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The Boldt Company earns fifth safety award
Company logs millions of safe work hours
for consecutive annual award
At The Boldt Company, safety isn’t just a priority; it’s a core corporate value. That’s one
of the reasons why Boldt is a winner of top honors among state companies for maintaining a
safe working environment. The firm received the safety excellence award at the annual
Wisconsin Safety and Health Congress Expo in May.
The Wisconsin Corporate Safety Awards are co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Council of
Safety and the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. The annual awards program
honors businesses for top safety records and recognizes companies that have low injury
incidence rates and establish health and safety procedures, policies and track results. In order
to qualify for this award in the construction category, Boldt needed to log more than 1 million
hours of safe work.
In 2006, the company’s Wisconsin operation reported a lost time incident rate of 0.9
compared to a national rate of 2.6. A lost time incident rate measures the number of injuries and
fatalities. The rates for 2006 were even better than the rates for 2005, a year in which Boldt also
won the award. Boldt’s Wisconsin work force logged about 1,100,000 hours over the past year.
“We had an excellent safety year,” said Jeff Schilleman, Boldt’s corporate safety director.
“The five years we’ve won the award represent well over 5-million hours of safe work.”
Schilleman says the company continues to log safe work hours due to activities that
build a culture of safety within the organization. This past year, the company changed focus to
identify behaviors on the job site that were unsafe and corrected those behaviors with pro-active
intervention. The process went beyond issuing safety rules and regulations, and observed
jobsite behaviors and root causes of potential safety problems.
“We concentrated on training the site foreman and superintendent because they’re the
team members that can most directly monitor safe and unsafe behavior on the job,” Schilleman
said. “For example, rather than telling a guy to wear safety glasses, we now help the worker
understand the consequences of unsafe behavior.”
In the instance of safety glasses, Schilleman identified that some workers might not wear
them due to poor fit, fogging or even because they could not see through them. The company
provided a variety of models including bifocal safety glasses for workers who needed them.
Schilleman wears them himself when he’s on the jobsite.
In addition to focused training for foremen and superintendents, Boldt’s more innovative
safety programs are:
 Each team member completes basic safety education followed by instruction specific to
a task and jobsite. In addition, team members on each job site participate in a daily 10-
minute safety meeting to review that day’s issues. Schilleman estimates each worker
logs 70-75 hours per person, per year in safety education.
 Boldt employs 13 full-time safety professionals who travel from job site to job site for
training and safety audits. In addition, each site foreman completes a daily safety task
analysis where specific hazards can be discussed and resolved prior to performing work.
 Boldt established a toll-free hotline so employees can call anonymously to report safety
issues.
 The company has improved safety education with regular safety communication on
Boldt’s intranet, in the corporate newsletter and on job sites.
 Boldt will begin a new safety program for all Wisconsin job sites aimed at worker
education through posters, training and a formalized “safety doctrine.”
Founded in 1889, The Boldt Company is a fourth generation, family-owned construction
firm, one of Wisconsin's largest construction firms, and among the top-ranked general
contractors in the nation. The firm is an industry leader in sustainable construction and design
and has participated in constructing numerous “green” projects across the nation. The firm
employs more than 1,200 people nationwide and is headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin with
offices in Milwaukee, Madison, Stevens Point, Oklahoma City, OK, Tulsa, OK, Augusta, GA,
Cloquet, MN, Grand Rapids, MN, Fairfield, CA, Oakbrook, IL and Chicago, IL. Boldt provides
strategic planning, sustainable consulting, design management services and construction
solution services to customers in a variety of industrial, institutional, healthcare and commercial
markets.
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